‘Fearless Felix’ Falls 24 Miles To Earth

Felix Baumgartner collects his thoughts in his trailer before heading for his capsule for his ascent to the stratosphere. Photo: Jörg Mitter/Red Bull Content Pool

Baumgartner gets a little help suiting up for his jump. Photo: Jörg Mitter/Red Bull Content Pool

Baumgartner heads for his capsule, which is suspended by a crane as the balloon is inflated. Photo: Red Bull Content Pool

Baumgartner steps into his capsule, where he would spend more than two hours ascending to more than 125,000 feet for his stratospheric jump. Photo: Red Bull Content Pool

We have liftoff. The capsule, suspended by a crane, about to begin its ascent. The lines attached to the capsule lead to the massive balloon, already aloft at this point. Photo: Red Bull Content Pool

The balloon, filled with 180,000 cubic feet of helium, climbing. The crane rolled forward with the capsule until the line was perpendicular to the ground, then released the capsule. Photo: Predrag Vuckovic/Red Bull Content Pool

Eva Baumgartner watches her son reach for the heavens. His parents ventured beyond Europe for the first time to see their son set a record for the world's highest skydive. Photo: Stefan Aufschnaiter/Red Bull Content Pool

Felix Baumgartner broke the speed of sound during his stratospheric leap from 128,097 feet on Sunday and landed safely 9 minutes and 3 seconds later, touching down so gracefully that he made the whole thing look easy. He fell to his knees and raised his fists as his family, hundreds of people supporting his mission and, no doubt, the millions of people watching worldwide via the Internet cheered.

It was awesome, in every sense of the word.

The Austrian adventurer reached an unofficial speed of 834 mph — Mach 1.24 — as he fell 119,846 feet during a free fall of 4 minutes and 20 seconds. With that, he unofficially became the first person to exceed the speed of sound in free fall while also setting unofficial records for the highest skydive and highest manned balloon flight in history. The only ring he didn’t grab was longest free fall ever.

“It was harder than I expected,” Baumgarter said after returning to mission control in Roswell, New Mexico, according to The New York Times. “Trust me, when you stand up there on top of the world, you become so humble. It’s not about breaking records anymore. It’s not about getting scientific data. It’s all about coming home.”

The 43-year-old former paratrooper topped the unofficial record retired Air Force Col. Joe Kittinger, now 84, set in 1960 when he jumped from 102,800 feet during Project Excelsior. The record-setting dive from 24.2 miles above Roswell, New Mexico, came 65 years to the day after Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 rocket. His mission was marred only by a faulty heating circuit in his visor and a tumble as he began his descent.

“Couldn’t have done it any better myself,” Kittinger, Baumgartner’s mentor and the only person in communication with him during the mission, said over the radio.

Baumgartner achieved three of the four records he was after, falling short of taking the benchmark for longest free fall away from Kittinger. All of the records are yet to be ratified by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, which according to the BBC had a representative in Roswell.

The Austrian, whose mission had been twice delayed by weather, lifted off at 9:31 a.m. Mountain time as his parents — making their first trip beyond Europe — and hundreds of well-wishers watched from Roswell and millions more watched online. Inside the capsule, Baumgartner smiled broadly at liftoff and gave the “No. 1″ sign with his finger as mission control erupted in applause and cheers.

It was nail-bitingly tense for several minutes as Baumgartner cleared the first 4,000 feet, an area called the “dead zone” because it would be impossible to deploy a parachute should something go wrong.

Once he cleared that hurdle, it was smooth sailing as the capsule floated upward at about 1,200 feet per minute. As the massive balloon, filled with 180,000 cubic feet of helium for the launch, rose, Baumgartner and Kittinger passed the time performing periodic systems checks and running through the pre-jump procedure — busy work designed, in part, to occupy Baumgartner’s mind and help him fight claustrophobia.

The ascent took 2 hours and 21 minutes, with Red Bull ticking off milestones as they passed: The so-called Armstrong limit at 63,000 feet, beyond which a pressurized suit is mandatory. Baumgartner’s previous test jumps from 71,000 feet in March and 97,000 feet in July. The 102,800-foot benchmark set by Kittinger. And then the 113,740-foot record, set in 1961, for the highest manned balloon flight. Outside the capsule, cameras showed the curvature of the earth — exaggerated by the wide-angle lens — and the line where the blue sky of earth meets the black vastness of space. It was beautiful to behold.

As the capsule passed 125,000 feet, Kittinger and Baumgartner began preparing for the jump — disconnecting his suit from the capsule’s oxygen system, stowing equipment and the like. Then it was time. Five years of training and countless millions of dollars — all of it provided by Red Bull, his sponsor — had come to this.

Kittinger, ever calm, told Baumgartner the pressure inside and outside the capsule hadn’t yet equalized. The capsule dangled in near-vacuum beneath a whisper-thin balloon that had expanded to 30 million cubic feet. “OK,” came the response, crackling over the radio. A camera showed Felix waiting patiently as the capsule continued rising.

And then, the door opened.

“There it is. There’s the world out there,” Kittinger said.

We were right there with him, thanks to a pair of cameras mounted outside the capsule, to take in the vastness of the scene and the enormity of what Baumgartner was about to do. The daredevil slid his seat forward until his feet were dangling 24.2 miles above the earth like a child sitting on the world’s highest swing.

“Start the cameras and our guardian angel will take care of you,” said Kittinger, the only man to have ever experienced anything approaching what Baumgartner felt at that moment. Baumgartner stood on the step just outside the hatch, hands grasping handrails at either side. His voice crackled over the radio.

“When you’re up here, you realize just how small you really are,” he said. “I’m coming home now.”

He made a snappy salute. And then he jumped.

It was breathtaking. Away he went, falling toward earth at frightening speed, breath coming hard and fast over the radio. Within moments he was approaching 700 mph, about the speed of sound at that altitude, and he was expected to break the sound barrier within 35 seconds. At mission control, his mother, Eva Baumgartner, wiped tears from her eyes.

“I could feel myself break the speed of sound,” Baumgartner said in a tweet hours after the jump. “I could feel the air building up and then I hit it.”

It didn’t go exactly as planned, and early on it looked like Baumgartner might be in trouble. He was supposed to descend in the “delta position” — head down, arms back — immediately after leaving the capsule. But he tumbled over and over before gaining control of the situation and stabilizing his descent.

“That spin became so violent it was hard to know how to get out of it,” Baumgartner said in a tweet this afternoon. “I was able to get it under control and break the speed of sound. There was a time I really thought I was in trouble. I had to decide to fight all the way down and I finally got stable.”

His parachute deployed somewhere around 6,000 feet. Baumgartner floated to earth beneath a bright, sunny sky. He landed on both feet without the slightest stumble, then dropped to his knees and raised his fists triumphantly as the ground crew raced toward him. A helicopter hovered nearby to carry him to mission control, and to the family waiting for him there.

UPDATED 3:50 p.m. Eastern with latest altitude, free fall time and speed.
UPDATED 5:15 p.m. Eastern with more details on the jump and reactions from Baumgartner.
UPDATED 5:45 p.m. Eastern with the latest unofficial speed from Red Bull.
UPDATED 10:30 p.m. Eastern with the latest photos and a highlights video.